WASHINGTON DC – NASA says the astronauts who are scheduled to touch down on the surface of the Moon as soon as late 2025 — if everything goes according to plan, an increasingly significant “if” — might not be the first organisms in town, Space.com reports.
“One of the most striking things our team has found is that, given recent research on the ranges in which certain microbial life can survive, there may be potentially habitable niches for such life in relatively protected areas on some airless bodies,” Prabal Saxena, a planetary researcher at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, told the site.
Said microbial life could be harbored by the lunar south pole’s permanently shadowed craters. In particular, Saxena wonders whether life forms that originated on Earth may have survived the journey there.
And that’s more relevant than ever, as NASA still has 13 locations near the south pole to choose from for its upcoming Artemis 3 mission, the first crewed mission to the Moon’s surface in over half a century.
Saxena and his team recently presented research at a workshop about these potential landing sites, arguing that we should consider the possibility of microbial life surviving on the Moon.
While experts have pointed out that organic molecules could very well have made their way through space via meteors, there’s no guarantee microbes could survive the trip.
To read more, click on Futurism
